1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to maintaining a page layout when adding new blank space to an electronic page that already contains content. More specifically, the present invention relates to growing the size of an electronic page when adding an item to the page, so that all of the items originally appearing in the page remain in that page, rather than being pushed onto a new page, deleted or clipped.
2. Related Art
As hand-held computers are becoming more prevalent, more and more people are note-taking, sketching or diagramming content onto “electronic” paper rather than physical paper. As used herein, the term electronic paper refers to electronic data that can be subsequently rendered on a display so as to resemble a paper document. Like physical paper, electronic paper is conventionally divided into discrete portions or “pages” that allow a user to quickly access specific portions of the electronic paper without having to scroll through the entire document. These pages typically are formatted with same sizes as actual paper (for example, 8½×11 inches). Unlike physical paper, however, electronic paper advantageously allows a user to easily insert additional content anywhere on a page, even if that location already contains content. The existing content is simply “pushed down” the page to allow room for insertion of the new content.
A variety of software applications employ electronic paper, such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Windows Journal One application of electronic paper that is particularly useful for users of hand-held computers is electronic ink. Electronic ink allows a user to create data by writing on a digitizer with a stylus. The digitizer records the user's writing as a sequence of strokes, where each stroke is comprised of a sequence of points. The points may be represented using a variety of known techniques including Cartesian coordinates (X, Y), polar coordinates (r, Θ), and other techniques as known in the art. The strokes may be associated with a set of properties such as, for example, color, width, pressure between the stylus and digitizer, and angle between the stylus and digitizer, and pen shape and the like.
As previously noted, a significant advantage to electronic ink, and to electronic paper generally, is the ease with which a user can place and move content around the electronic paper. Various applications of electronic ink, for example, allow a user to open up new white space on the electronic paper simply by “pushing” all of other content down the page. Thus, unlike actual paper, a user can go to a relevant portion of a page that already contains content, insert white space, and then write additional content in the added white space. The value of this feature is limited, however, by the size of the page being used by the electronic paper application. If the user inserts enough space into a page, eventually some of the content on that page will be pushed off the bottom of the page and onto the top of the next page, clipped, or deleted.
Pushing content off of a page onto the subsequent page may create an undesired cascading effect on all following pages. For example, diagrams may become split across pages, labels may become separated from their associated pictures, content may be caused to be regrouped in unexpected ways, and notes may become separated from associated content. This inadvertent cascading may frustrate the ease and convenience offered by the flexibility of electronic paper. Even if a user expected content to be split across pages, it is rarely the case where the system would correctly split the content as there are fewer ways for the system to know where to split the context across pages. Free form input cannot be split as easily as text across multiple pages.
Similarly, electronic paper allows a user to easily remove content or space from an existing document. Conventionally, however, deleting content from one page may “pull” content from a subsequent page onto the page from which the content or space has been removed. This “pulling” may likewise create an undesired effect on the following pages.